Some people call Riga the Thailand of the Baltics, I presume its because off all the sex tourism as I never managed to find its tropics I never found its vice either, but then again I wasn't looking. Either way is pretty tragic. The women here look like they are trying to dress cheap, or maybe they are trying to dress classy but all the clothes are cheap. Died hair, leather skirts, fishnet tights. Its all a bit of a horror show. This of course is a little unfair. Not all the women look cheap but a vast majority do and if it is a difference in styles the fault is mine not theirs. The men though, they look like they carry baseball bats for walking sticks and wear knuckle dusters for wedding rings and I'm certain they don't but I think there intentions to the legions of tourists who invade their city may as well be as if they did.
Which is in contrast to the city itself, because Riga is a nice place. I think the Dutch must have been here at some point, plying their trade and building their houses. It might be on Baltics but there is a touch of the Zeiter Sea here in some of their buildings. Art Nouveaux is dominant too, all built when Riga was rich. I never seem so much curved and floral relief all juxtaposed with medieval cobbled streets.
There is a Church here too, looks barque but not, the style might be called rocco but I don't know my art history. I've never seen anything like it. Its made of bronze or brass, and has a spire that saws high above the city. I went up to the top to have a look around, and saw Riga laid out below me. From up here it looked like a medeival village, but down there it had the feel of a city. Luther is the man for the religious, up here amongst the Baltic states. I saw his painting on a Church wall, his hooked nose beaking out at me. I was there listening to a Bach organ fuge and the heretic gave me the heeby-jebbies. Not Bach of course but Luther, Bach can make your hair stand on end, but only in a good way.
The central market in Riga, is inside four old zepplin hangers, built back when Airships were going to be the future of air transport. Sometimes, it looks like commerce in Riga hasn't moved on much since those heady past days. It;s so cheap you're buying several months shop for the price of a weeks, if you converted Great Britians into Latvians. Its a pity the choice isn't so great, I cant imagine what it would have been like under the communists, probably just a funeral train of old grey women selling bread and Vodka.
I brought a meal, it was mash and meatballs and an orange sauce. Finding a cheap place to eat has become a sixth sense. The seveth was for the mugging. The sauce tasted good, I recognised it from primary school but I couldnt place it, but I knew I hadn't had it for years. As I shovelled the congealed potatoes into my mouth, the memory congealed too. It was that sauce you get from straining the hoops out of spaghetti hoops, half tomato, half sugar. I am quite sure of it. It was the right colour for it too, luminous orange. I don't know what they did with the hoops but I never did find them on my plate, perhaps they sell them separability as some local cusine.
In the Hostel hunkered over the computer and nursing a Beer was a ragedy man in a ragid coat. He was American. I didnt ask him his name, I didnt really want to talk to him, but he wanted to talk to me. He was working in Moscow selling investment products. Now I know a little bit about this market, and I know you dont sell investment products be a big success and holiday in a Hostel. He was right wing, to the right of Mussolini. He didn't believe in evolution, he said it was "all wrong, damn it". He was one of those types who think the world was just shy of 5000 years.
I'm no Darwinisit, I don't know enough about it to be one. However, I trust those who do and I'm quite confident its the best idea we have. The thing about being right and wrong, is that right and wrong is not discrete digital units but an analouge scale. If I said the world is round and you said the world is flat, we would both be wrong, but your wrong is far worse than mine. If that analogy sounds smart, its because it is, and its not mine, I first read it while reading Asimov. I tried to explain this discretion to the American, but he was a fundamentalists, and you can't talk to fundamentalists about anything; they won't change their mind and they can't change the subject, not mine either, Churchill's.
He had a stash of boiled eggs, which he would crack on the table, roll around, then peel with the long dirty nails of his thin gaunt nails. He would dictate, while chewing. He looked like a biker version of skeletor, all skin bones and an oversized greying, black leather jacket. No breaks between eggs and Phillipics for this man, he must have thought I valued his insights, which I didn't. They were racist, vile, simple,overbearing and loud. It was horrible. I called him the Boiled egg monster, a child's nightmare, a liberals too. He used liberal as if it was a dirty word. I told him I was Liberal through and through. He didn't like me and the feeling was mutual, but like riding a tiger, the conversations I had with him were so extreme in their excitement it was impossible to get off. If I had I would have been swallowed whole by his self aggrandizing and miss-placed bravado. I got the last laugh though. As I said I know a little about markets and I am certain you're not in Investment and a success if your protein for the day is boiled egg and carbohydrates, spiteful words and bilious opinions.
Riga must have been collecting the odd balls of Europe. A staging ground, for the expansion of Ripleys believe it or Not into the Great Russian interior. There was a British man there, who might have been a sex-pat, but he didn't look it. He was in Riga for five months. He made his money writing advertisements for party balloons. I didnt understand it either. In this hostel I seemed to be the only person who had a normal source of income, or at least had. This Brit had got married to a Lithuanian woman after just three days.
He told me and I said: "That sounds like trouble".
It was. She also had a boyfriend. She was coming to visit the Brit to talk things over. I presume money was involved.
"Whatever you do. dont mention that I told you we got married"
"I wouldn't dream of it."
I really wouldn't. I saw the man and his "wife" later and gave them both a wide berth, you don't want to get mixed up in that sort of business.
There was a Swede on holdiay too. He was seedy and I despised him from the off. He had just had his hair cut you could tell, and he had gone for the Sleazed, Back and Slides look. He said he liked Riga because the women were cheap. I said I thought he was a disgrace and didn't like it for the same reason. He said that he thought British girls were ugly and didn't dress sexy. I told him, that he mistook sexy for cheap and I said it would't matter because "our girls wouldn't go near you". They wouldn't he was very ugly and British girls, or the ones I know can spot a creep a mile off.
Riga was all going wrong. I was having a dreadful time. Everyone I ran into domestic or forighn seemed to have been at the methanol vodka. There Brains rotted by alcohol or embroiled in machinations so complex, confusing and sinister that soon the only sensible escape would be booze. I was getting down, In Brataslavia I thought I had found my second wind, but like a Sea Breeze it ended with the sunset. I was going to drink myself into a depressed haze, but on the steppes of the Hostel there was a girl reading Crime and Punishment.
Now literature, good literature is the way to my heart. She was Russian reading a Russian classic. To have had her language! And, her books, that would have been something! We spoke for hours about Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn. It was a great conversation. Neither of us were faking it, which is rare when you talk to anyone about books. I asked her why Russians were so good at writing, she said "What else would you do in the Winter?" I told her I'd probably drink. My flippancy almost ruined it. But it was fine, we were both Bibliophiles, we had read the Classics and both loved them. We had both been having long and lecherous affairs with the written word.
It really made Riga for me, a book club in the Baltics that made the whole trip worthwhile. I'd travel half way round the world for a talk that good, in fact that's almost what I had done. By distance on the rails I could probably have been in Siberia by now.
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